Patient experience and its importance for health centers

Photo: Surface

Patient experience is very important for each health center and the overall health system. However, what is exactly patient experience and how does it impact health centers and their medical offers? In this article, we are going to review the importance for the medical center of knowing the patients' experience. Let us begin by first going over everything that is encompassed by the patient experience during a healthcare journey.

What are some of the main things encompassed by the term patient experience?

For starters, a simple definition would be to explain or rather define the patient experience as the range of interactions that patients have with the healthcare system. To further explain this term, this means all of the interactions such as patients requesting information about the healthcare journey, interacting with staff, scheduling appointments, communicating with the medical staff, etc.

How does it impact health centers?

Patient experience is closely associated with the patient's perception of care and therefore differs from patient satisfaction. Since it is directly related to the patient's perception of care and the delivered medical services, patient experience is incredibly important. It describes how a person feels about their experience of receiving care and this impacts every health center. Considering the fact that nowadays patients' experience is regarded as one of the key indicators of quality in healthcare delivery, health centers are looking for new ways to further improve the patient experience and thus also improve their own efficiency and outreach as well.

Health centers always aim to deliver better services and improve their patient communication precisely to enhance the experience of their patients and make their healthcare journeys a lot easier and stress-free. This in turn helps health centers increase their outreach and also have more patients.

Why it matters?

The relationship between positive patient experience and positive clinical outcomes is clear. Health centers should always aim to keep their patients' experience as high as possible. Some of the main advantages of making sure your patients have a great experience during their medical journey are:

• Better patient safety - improved clinical outcomes and higher patient satisfaction scores lead to patients feeling a lot safer and more comfortable during their medical journeys.

• Shorter stays and reduced admissions - when patients have a great experience, they also tend to have reduced admissions to health centers.

• Greater equity - improved patient experience is also closely connected to greater equity in access to care.

• Better communication - when patient satisfaction but more importantly experience is at a high level, the communication between health centers and patients is better, more efficient, and faster.

• Patient engagement is improved - a patient experience that is positive will tend to engage the patients even more in their healthcare journeys and they will be able to better understand their healthcare pathway.